Some notes on A New Economics of Community and The Land (The Nation)

In 1856, some years after the Great Famine in Ireland, an article appeared in the Irish nationalist newspaper The Nation titled A New Economics of Community and The Land. While the true author of the article is not known, it was credited to the pseudonym Thomas Brennan, coincidentally a namesake of the eventual founder and secretary of the Irish Land League in the late 1870s. The Nation had already become qell known as the platform for radical nationalist discourse by the time the article was published, with its founders involved in various other political and social organisations, such as Young Ireland. One of The Nation's recurrent themes was the issues surrounding tenant's rights: centuries before, the Penal Laws had removed the rights to land away from Irish natives and given to a new class of wealthy Protestant settlers from Britain. The Irish farmers then had to rent their land from the new landowners, a system which continued throughout the 19th century during the Great Famine. The result was further hardship on the farmers, who were faced with the choice of selling their agricultural produce to pay rent on the land, or feed their families. The protests surrounding tenant's rights during the Great Famine inevitably lead to numerous passionate articles in the Irish nationalist press, although Thomas Brennan's text stands out for its radical views on community and economics. At the time of publication, the article had little political influence, and is still largely forgotten to contemporary readings of Irish history.

Brennan's article reads like a proposal for the realisation of a new socioeconomic system, emboldened by a number of supporting illustrations indicating how the system works geographically. His introduction describes how, as a result of the industrial revolution, labour is being deliberately centralised by the ruling classes in cities through a variety of gradual processes. Firstly, the introduction of new farming technologies during the agricultural revolution left many farm labourers without work.